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Why was the silver to gold ratio so much lower in Ancient/Medieval times?
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<p>[QUOTE="harrync, post: 6367632, member: 58588"]I don't have time to dig up my sources, so this is from memory, but I think basically correct. Ancient Egypt: two oz gold to one oz silver [yes, silver was more valuable than gold.] The most likely explanation was that gold was easy to spot, silver might just look like a black lump. Ancient Israel: 5 oz sliver to one of gold. There is no direct quote in the Bible, but some cleric figured out that ratio from a series of links. It went something like one oz gold for one slave; one slave bought two oxen; two oxen worth 100 bushels of grain; 100 bushels of grain worth 5 oz silver. [That's not his actual sequence, just made it up to show how it worked.] Apparently the Hunt Brothers were big Bible believers, and thought they were safe buying silver as long as the ratio stayed above 5 to one, thus kept buying even as the price got ridiculous. You can still find people studying the Biblical gold/silver ratio on some websites. Ancient Greece and Rome: about 10 to one. Middle ages until late 1800's: about 15 to one. Then the Comstock lode was discovered and silver flooded the market, so eventually the governments stopped free coinage of silver; that is, you could no longer take your silver to the mint and have it made into silver dollars. [And apparently the Comstock lode was overlooked for several years because people were so busy looking for gold no one paid attention to that "blueish sand".] Today: whatever the market decides. And note that a lot of silver is mined no matter what the price is; about half of all silver production is a byproduct of mining other minerals.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>
[QUOTE="harrync, post: 6367632, member: 58588"]I don't have time to dig up my sources, so this is from memory, but I think basically correct. Ancient Egypt: two oz gold to one oz silver [yes, silver was more valuable than gold.] The most likely explanation was that gold was easy to spot, silver might just look like a black lump. Ancient Israel: 5 oz sliver to one of gold. There is no direct quote in the Bible, but some cleric figured out that ratio from a series of links. It went something like one oz gold for one slave; one slave bought two oxen; two oxen worth 100 bushels of grain; 100 bushels of grain worth 5 oz silver. [That's not his actual sequence, just made it up to show how it worked.] Apparently the Hunt Brothers were big Bible believers, and thought they were safe buying silver as long as the ratio stayed above 5 to one, thus kept buying even as the price got ridiculous. You can still find people studying the Biblical gold/silver ratio on some websites. Ancient Greece and Rome: about 10 to one. Middle ages until late 1800's: about 15 to one. Then the Comstock lode was discovered and silver flooded the market, so eventually the governments stopped free coinage of silver; that is, you could no longer take your silver to the mint and have it made into silver dollars. [And apparently the Comstock lode was overlooked for several years because people were so busy looking for gold no one paid attention to that "blueish sand".] Today: whatever the market decides. And note that a lot of silver is mined no matter what the price is; about half of all silver production is a byproduct of mining other minerals.[/QUOTE]
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Why was the silver to gold ratio so much lower in Ancient/Medieval times?
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